Kid may be fine when eaten abroad, but it will never be on the menu for Sunday
lunch.

At Pizza Hut the poster in the window declares “Kids eat free”. But, now that Harrods has decided, in response to an apparent surge in appetites among the carnivores of Knightsbridge, to stock goat-meat, the fashionable motto will be: “Eat kids expensively.”

Historically, goat has not been popular for Sunday lunch in Britain. This has nothing to do with the flavour. Flavour seldom comes into the popularity of foods. W H Auden, in his Letters from Iceland, recommends trying two local dishes. One is hákarl, which is half-dry, half-rotten shark. “Owing to the smell,” he notes, “it has to be eaten out of doors.” The other is reyngi, the tail of a whale, pickled in sour milk for a year or so. “Talking about pickling in sour milk,” he adds, “the Icelanders also do this to sheep’s udders, and the result is surprisingly nice.”

Perhaps so, but it is not the British way. We (as is proved by our angry expostulation when it is suggested) are very like the Dutch. We happily consume any amount of cheese strings, custard, chicken nuggets, steam-cooked bread, pot noodles and Colin the Caterpillar sponge birthday cakes. It’s not that these taste nasty; they scarcely taste at all.

Yet goat – or kid, which is to goat as lamb is to mutton – must be regarded as a modest enough meat, likely to appeal to cautious British palates. Wordsworth’s heart leaped up when he beheld a rainbow in the sky, and mine leaps up when I behold cabrito, “kid” on the menu. That would be in Spain.

The Spanish are very good at presenting things plainly. Ask for kid and it arrives, or a leg of it does, sitting on a plate alone. There might be a few little potatoes, but these are not to be eaten in anger, as it were. They were merely caught in the crossfire, collateral damage, to be regarded as a garnish, as parsley is to a lamb cutlet.

“Once the little goat is sacrificed,” my Spanish cook-book tells me, “it is convenient to hang him in a chill place or north-facing larder for a couple of days.” After that, just “put him in a dish of clay, daub him with the fat of a pig and roast him in a somewhat lively oven”. The only thing to remember is to crush the accompanying garlic cloves if they be too large.

So cooking the creature presents no problems. The only thing to remember is not to seethe it in its mother’s milk, as the 14th chapter of Deuteronomy reminds us. The same chapter also counsels against eating the eagle, the ossifrage, the ospray, the glede, the kite, and the vulture after his kind, not to mention the owl, the night hawk, the cuckow, the pelican, the swan, the gier eagle, the cormorant, the lapwing, and the bat. This, it seems to me, hits the nail on the head.

These winged creatures do not necessarily taste strongly. Swan, as a recent correspondence on the Letters page assured us, is delicious. The vulture after his kind perhaps not. Bland or pungent, the idea of eating them sent a shudder through the hearts of the Children of Israel because they are not the sort of thing one eats. This is not a circular argument, for it is exactly the same disgust that we exercise towards horse.

Of course we like horses, for jumping over striped poles at the pony show or to bet on, but not to eat. Nor is this a matter of cuteness. We can scarcely wait to hang the dear little baa-lambs in a chill place. And it is not any idea that horses are dirty, like dogs, because of their diet. A foal reared on mare’s milk and spring grass no doubt produces a sweet, delicate-textured steak. Yet it would revolt us, halfway through tucking in to it, with or without chips, to learn it was not calf.

The kid does not share the foal’s established diplomatic immunity from consumption. Rather, it is regarded as inedible because of its goatish reputation. It is almost as if we might catch something by letting it pass our lips. The goat is seen as demonic and sexually depraved. There is nothing it can do to remove this stain from its character. No matter how keenly it clattered off to choral Evensong or took a serious interest in Delft pottery it would still be the object of institutionalised speciesism, a scapegoat if there ever was one.

Of course, you and I and all free spirits who sail beyond the seas have learnt to love the savour of goat. But in doing so we have perhaps sold part of our birthright for a mess of kid-pottage. Soon, no doubt, some news report, encouraged by the Frog Marketing Board, will announce that frogs’ legs are the big new seller in the high street.

In our hearts, though, we know it can never be. Frogs and snails and pigs’ ears and insect grubs will always remain a holiday food or a Bush Tucker Trial for as long as Britain retains an identifiable cuisine of its own. Food is a language, an expression of shared culture, not a matter of taste.